This is
not an official report; this is my personal interpretation of the WPC event
in 2003, which I organized myself. For the interested: this page contains only
one link: to the WPC rules on Farmer's Bridge, which I wrote last year after Oulu.

This site
is made by myself, with some help from Bill and his
company. I'm not a webdesigner, not even a bad one,
but some things will work. If you have any comments, please let me know.

Another five minutes

My report on the 12th WPC, Papendal, The Netherlands, october
2003

Two years ago I started making and
selecting puzzles for the 12th WPC, not realizing that it would be a lot more
work than 'just three National Championships in three consecutive days'. We
did it once before, the WPC in 1996, but at that time Peter did a lot of
work; this time I was in charge.

One of the first things I did was
creating a large team of puzzlemakers and -solvers:
I know a lot of them personally due to the Dutch National Championships. So I
asked Tim Peeters and Delia Keetman
to develop new formats and content, and I asked some others to be around,
correct and test the puzzles. (Jan Beelen, StefKeetman, Marieke Quant, AnnickWeyzig, SaskiaBenedictus, AnnekeGrünefeld, Rick Uppelschoten, in no particular order,
thanks).

Tim, Delia and me had several
meetings this year, every time we got closer to the final result. We had
enough ideas for two or three WPC's (future organizers: there are a lot of
original ideas available!) and at the end we decided to do it the way we did.
We tested 'The weakest link' on a sunny Sunday in my garden, and the result
was 37 minutes for the first puzzle, and 32 for the final puzzle. We also
tested the finals that day. Originally, the Easy as…puzzle was too hard, so I
made it easier. We tested the two assorted individual rounds, and each solver
had more points on the second round, which seams to be a good idea:
increasing points during the competition.

There's a lot that changed, during
all those brainstorm and test-sessions; most of them are not very
interesting. But… I was afraid of competitors finishing all puzzles: it
didn't happen. I was afraid of puzzles with multiple solutions, and it
happened once, in the finals, but we were in time to give Ulrich credit for
his solution on the Cross sums. I was afraid for the time bonus rounds, but came op with the 'Five more minutes'-rule, which gave me a
lot of space. I was afraid of a final where the number eight would beat the
number one - it didn't happen. (Only Niels and
Michael switched places…). I was afraid that the number of points during the
team rounds (including bonusses) was too much, but
finally I think that the top-three teams is correct.
And I was afraid of all worst-case scenario's, but
none of them happened, so why bother - after all.

I would like to thank my
colleagues and others for correcting the puzzles during the championships. I
would like to thank Rob and Jan for their support and trust. I would like to
thank all members of the Dutch team (Paul Jacobs, NielsRoest, Bram de Laat,
Maarten Löffler and Alex Samsom):
they did a good job and reached the third place, never reached by a Dutch
team before. Finally, I would like to thank all competitors, captains, guests
and sponsors: it was a hell of a job, and I did it for you. I hope you liked
it, and I hope to see you all in Croatia next year!

As part of preparation for solving the sort of
puzzles that were not going to be in the competition at all, I had solved the
(cryptic) crossword in the Financial Times on the plane ride (my first ever cryptic
solved without consulting external references! yay!).
I would later check my answers with Will Shortz, whose name should require no further
introduction to anyone reading this report.

The day of arrival was calm and laid-back; a
good time to meet old friends and new and get in a small game of "midget
golf" (the Dutch name for miniature golf), especially since the course
would be crowded with puzzlers three days from now.

Another exciting part was meeting the two new
US team members: Todd Geldon, a graduate student in
mathematics at UT-Austin, and Michael Miller, a mechanical engineer from
Pensacola, Florida. The fourth team member, Roger Barkan,
didn't arrive until much later. I introduced a game I had purchased at the
Frankfurt airport on the way -- "6 Nimmt" by Wolfgang Kramer. (It had been released as
"Take 6" in the US about 10 years ago but had long since gone out
of print.) In that we were also joined by Ulrich Voigt, the two-time world
puzzle champion from Germany who apparently knows his share of German games
as well.

The next morning started off with a
question-and-answer section on the instructions. This session ran shorter and
cleaner than previous years, thanks to the foresight the organizers had of
putting the puzzle instructions on the WWW one week before the event.

This was soon followed by a photo shoot, where
the entire American entourage looked quite smart in their first-ever official
team jackets, donated generously by our sponsor, Google.

This year's organization was much more spartan in its scheduled events; we would have one day to
overcome our jet lag (not a problem for me and Nick, since we had arrived a
few days earlier to attend the annual Dutch Cube Day) and we had a choice between three
excursions; a shopping trip to downtown Arnhem, a trip to Burger's Zoo, or
a trip to the Arnhem open-air museum, where everyone would also have dinner
(including my first ever experience with Baked Alaska). Although this was in sharp contrast with
previous years when it seemed like there were always too many excursions and
not enough sleep, as it turns out we never found
ourselves with lack of things to do.

All of the Americans, with the exception of
Roger the rebel, went shopping. No puzzle stores, but I found a few games to
buy, including Villa Paletti, winner of the 2002 Game of the Year (Spiel des Jahres) award. Nick found a Dutch edition of 6 Nimmt, which apparently is called "Take 5!"in Dutch and is nominated for this year's NederlandseSpellenprijs. (I'll let you solve the puzzle of why
there's an apparent numerical discrepancy. But feel free to ask me for the
answer.) Although I found a used bookstore, Will Shortz
had already cleaned out most of the puzzle books of note, leaving only the
dregs for me -- including a 1995 issue of BreinBrekers! Very interesting to open up the booklet and see
how different the magazine looked then, with an editor's note written by Rob Geensen, now organizer of the WPC. (Those notes were
actually ghostwritten by Peter
Ritmeester, and would be later written under his own name. They're
now written by Hans Eendebak.)

Mealtimes were filled with lots of puzzle
discussion at the tables. For instance, earlier Will had asked the whole WPC
if anyone had any good international puzzles that he could use on his weekly segment on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition
Sunday. He eventually decided on a nice puzzle for his October 19th show (I
believe yours truly was mentioned on the show as well), which I won't
reproduce here. One close contender was the riddle: "I have 11 brothers
and sisters, 48 nieces and nephews, and 28 grandchildren. Who or what am
I?" (I don't remember who came up with this puzzle -- apologies in
advance for not crediting you here.)

The next day the competition started. This
year there was much more variety in the different scoring formats -- for
instance, a 30-minute "sprint" round where only the number of
puzzles you solve matters, not which ones; and a "relay" round
where you need the solution to the previous puzzle to be able to solve the
next one. After that first day, I was (perhaps irrationally) depressed; I had
an unspectacular round 1, and had spent 25 precious minutes on a tedious
45-point puzzle in round 2, only to make a small mistake and gain no points. To
top it off, I lost really badly at our yearly traditional game of Rifki to HusnuSincar, the Turk who would later be elected to a
position on the World Puzzle Federation Committee to take ErjaGullsten's vacated seat.

As it turns out, I was too pessimistic. At
that point, I was actually tied for fourth place with NielsRoest, the Dutch champion from last year, 5 points behind
Roger, and a whopping 140 points behind Ulrich. The team standings were
similar, with us in second place, behind the Germans by 176 points and barely
staying ahead of the Dutch by 7 points.

The second day's competition spread out the
pack, with the timing of the rounds being more accurately paced with the top
competitors. One of the exciting team rounds was entitled "The Weakest
Link", where each of the four members of the team have
to solve a puzzle individually to get one quarter of the final puzzle. This
was a killer round, with only Belgium and the Netherlands managing to finish.
By the time the dust had settled, the Germans were in a comfortable lead with
3807 points, the Dutch in second at 3699, and Team USA in third with 3611. With
only one individual round in round 3 worth a maximum of 50 points (and that
only to the fastest individual competitor), Ulrich had secured his
first-place seed for the finals with 1150 points, whild
I had secured second with 1035 points -- Roger and Niels
were tied at third with 935, their only danger being Michael Ley of Germany with 885.

That night, MetinOrsel of Turkey invited Nick, me, and Derek Kisman of Canada for a rematch of a complex bidding
version of Rifki that we had invented at the WPC in
Oulu, Finland last year. Derek declined (he had been up at 3AM the day before
for a TopCoder competition!), but Metin'steammateUmytAbaciodlu filled out the
fourth. A great game, but with only one playtest
per year, it needs some work -- at 10 minutes per hand, a full game of 20
hands takes quite a while!

The third and last day of the competition
began. Roger pulled out the fastest finish, securing the 3rd place seed for
him (and 4th place for Niels). But with Roger being
the only American to finish, compared to two each from Germany and the
Netherlands, we basically needed a perfect score on the last team round to
gain second place, while the Dutch needed the same perfect score to gain
first. Fortunately, we didn't know this and the Dutch did -- we went on to be
the only team to solve the last round, an exciting cube-construction puzzle
that is now sitting on my desk at work at the time I write this.

But on to the individual playoffs, a
single-elimination matchup between the top eight
competitors. Each matchup would have the two
competitors on stage solving three giant puzzles on posterboard,
with no time limit except the solving speed of one's opponent, and a very
large audence watching to add to the excitement. (For
instance, one of my friends, the talented puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer,
had made a special visit to see the finals and was in the audience.) Once a
contestant decided to submit their answers, both would stop solving, and the
winner would be decided based on whether those submitted answers were correct
or not -- the progress of the other person being completely irrelevant!

As there was only room for four competitors at
a time, Roger and I had to wait inside a shielded room with 6th seed Sebastien Leroy from Belgium and 7th seed Shinichi Aoki
from Japan, while outside Ulrich faced-off against 8th place Zoltan Horvath from Hungary with Niels
and Michael on the other side of the stage.

Five minutes passed. Then ten. We were getting
nervous; apparently the quarter-final puzzles weren't going to be easy! A big
cheer of applause erupted from the other room; Ulrich had defeated Zoltan. But neither Niels nor
Michael were close; we waited for what seemed like an interminable time
(probably just another 10 minutes) before another wave of applause happened
-- Niels, world champion from 2002, had been
eliminated in the first low-seed upset!

Then our competition started. We were a bit
more prepared because we knew how much time the other four had took. I
finished reasonably quickly (probably about the same amount of time that
Ulrich took) and took the risk of checking my answers before submitting --
although if I had known how close Shinichi was at that point I probably
wouldn't have! Roger took much longer to defeat Sebastien,
but he did, ensuring that regardless of who won in the semifinals,
the finals were going to be a German versus an American.

The semifinals
began. Although spectators later told me that I looked amazingly calm on
stage, with my left hand in my pocket as I swaggered around, I have to
declare now that my left hand was in my pocket to stop it from shaking from
nervousness! But I mangaged to solve all three
puzzles, and was debating on whether to check them when I heard a wave of
applause behind me; Ulrich had declared. That clinched it; I decided not to
check and to submit my answers as well. Thankfully, they were correct. It
would now be me against Ulrich in the final, and to be honest I probably
wouldn't be betting on me...

The three puzzles in the finals were indeed
harder than the quarterfinals or semifinals. Ulrich
and I both polished one (star battle) off quickly, but then we were stuck on
the other two. I shuffled my boards back and forth a lot, which (I found out
later) really unnerved Ulrich because it sounded like I was making progress. But
that was far from the case; one of the puzzles (a
cross-sums) needed a key insight to make progress, and the other (an abcd-fill) needed either an extremely intricate deduction
or a lucky guess to make work. I had neither; Ulrich managed to find both the
insight and the luck, to take his (well-deserved) third crown as world puzzle
champion.

So the conclusion was that with the exception
of Niels and Michael switching places, the top seed
always beat out the lower seed. I wonder how they would've handled the final
ranking if any of the other potental upsets had
happened!

The closing ceremonies were well-orchestrated
but otherwise unremarkable and not unlike the other dinners we had, with some
form of beef stew (Todd and Mike joked that all our dinners seemed to have
beef stew in some form or another) and Dutch performers on stage singing
American pop tunes from the last 50 years while us Americans ignored them and
worked on puzzles. I was working on a rather elegant multi-layered puzzle
designed by Roger (in previous years Roger, as a puzzle designer for things
like the MIT mystery hunt, had brought WPC-style warmup
puzzles, but this year all he had was a English-dependent one called
"The Battle for Skyport") and eventually
got it, with some help from the UK team. In the meantime, a big game of RasendeRoboter ("Ricochet Robot"
in English) was going on in the back of the room.

The trophy was beautiful and very puzzly -- a jigsaw puzzle of a globe, replete with
continents and land features, cast in gorgeous metal that were held to a
sphere through magnetism. Unfortunately, my second-place individual trophy
had three missing pieces, inexplicably, and so I left it with Rob for
replacement. I'm pretty sure I'll see it soon, though!

As a nice parting gift, the organizers of the 2004 World Puzzle
Championship in Croatia gave me a book filled with beautiful pictures of the
Adriatic. Here's looking to next year, where maybe Zack (whom, I've been
told, was missed both on the soccer field and off) can return to writing
these trip reports!